My bus bars arrived which I designed myself, they are made from 1/2" square copper bar and 10" long. 4mm holes have been drilled out to accommodate the conectors.
This is what they look like with the connectors in

busbar 3.jpg (7.88 KiB) Viewed 2951 times

and below a close up.

The bus bar company did an excellent job and I'm pleased with the results, now I need to get the connectors braized to the bus bars and get my battery box to be fabricated.

Nice job done as well, now I need to buy the socket for the bike. My HVC/LVC breaker and 5S HVC/LVC boards arrived today as well, they are really tiny. Now where is my battery box? I am getting quite close to having everything ready for connection and testing. Hopefully my next post will see some movement on the bike build and perhaps a spinning rear wheel.

Hi nice build where in uk are you I'm in Essex. I'm thinking of turning my zx6r b1h into ev and the gearbox seleted two get at once at 60mph. I kept it up but totalled gearbox. Got one prob with my build planing on doing work out only get around 30ah

Idontwanttopedal wrote:Hi nice build where in uk are you I'm in Essex. I'm thinking of turning my zx6r b1h into ev and the gearbox seleted two get at once at 60mph. I kept it up but totalled gearbox. Got one prob with my build planing on doing work out only get around 30ah

Thanks for the comments, I am based in Cambridgeshire. There are not a lot of us in the UK.

John in CR wrote:Do you already have your batteries? With a pack that size consisting of cells of a chemistry where an issue with 1 cell can cause a thermal runaway of the entire pack in less than a minute, be sure you understand the precautions required. It boils down to making sure no faulty cells make it into the pack, and make sure each cell can neither be discharged to too low a voltage or charged to too high a voltage, and they will serve you well.

Can't wait to see pics.

John

Hi John,
I have worked out how to reply to individuals, yes I have some batteries 8 LiPo's which will be 4 on parallel. I have the correct charger and balance boards, I will build the pack up as finances allow.

Before you reorder think about doing only 2 bus bars, your positive and negative...less cost, less work, less weight, less risk of a short. Simply plug the packs to each other in series. Your balancing board will create the parallel structure for you that you need at the cell level, not the Turnigy pack level. The bus bars in the middle of the pack don't accomplish anything.

The motorcycle section of the forum doesn't get a lot of action. Before proceeding I think you should have the guys in the battery section go over your pack and offer suggestions about how to best set up to monitor and protect your pack, as well as make it convenience to balance.

John in CR wrote:Before you reorder think about doing only 2 bus bars, your positive and negative...less cost, less work, less weight, less risk of a short. Simply plug the packs to each other in series. Your balancing board will create the parallel structure for you that you need at the cell level, not the Turnigy pack level. The bus bars in the middle of the pack don't accomplish anything.

The motorcycle section of the forum doesn't get a lot of action. Before proceeding I think you should have the guys in the battery section go over your pack and offer suggestions about how to best set up to monitor and protect your pack, as well as make it convenience to balance.

John

Hi John,
You have a very good point, I mapped your suggestion out as an option before and I will probably go down this route. I had already ordered some 5.5mm connectors but only 9 pairs which will be enough. That leaves me with spare bus bars for my next bike build. I thing I went for the current design based on Methods pdf which I downloaded from Jozzer's website.

I like the new plan better because you can also more safely have the packs "prove" themselves with use by running the pack with only the ends of the strings paralleled. With that many packs you are almost certain to have some duds, or at least some with a significantly weaker cell. The reason I say it's safer is because If you force each pack at a parallel level to have an identical voltage, then a low cell has to be has its effect spread over the 4 other cells verses 19 other cells without the bus bar.

eg. Let's say there's a bad cell whose voltage ends up 0.5V low . That puts you overcharging the other 5 cells even if you were charging only to 4.15V . With only 2 bus bars, the effect is spread over 19 cells, so instead of a too high 4.25V charge, they end up a safe 4.18V. With that many packs you obviously won't individually balance charge each pack on each cycle, and if you go with full parallel structure at the cell level, the bad cell remains hidden. Cell level paralleling and monitoring is safest, but it forces you to test the packs under load before the pack is assembled in order to sort out the weak packs. I have no means of doing that, so I test with conservative real world use. After 10-20 shallow cycles, those which stay in perfect balance are trusted enough for cell level parallel structure and weak packs removed.

I've had a brand new unused pack flameout while sitting undisturbed for a month, so I treat them like fire bombs until they have proven themselves in use, so there's just no way I'm letting a weak pack hide inside my pack. Each has to prove worthy.

I like the new plan better because you can also more safely have the packs "prove" themselves with use by running the pack with only the ends of the strings paralleled. With that many packs you are almost certain to have some duds, or at least some with a significantly weaker cell. The reason I say it's safer is because If you force each pack at a parallel level to have an identical voltage, then a low cell has to be has its effect spread over the 4 other cells verses 19 other cells without the bus bar.

eg. Let's say there's a bad cell whose voltage ends up 0.5V low . That puts you overcharging the other 5 cells even if you were charging only to 4.15V . With only 2 bus bars, the effect is spread over 19 cells, so instead of a too high 4.25V charge, they end up a safe 4.18V. With that many packs you obviously won't individually balance charge each pack on each cycle, and if you go with full parallel structure at the cell level, the bad cell remains hidden. Cell level paralleling and monitoring is safest, but it forces you to test the packs under load before the pack is assembled in order to sort out the weak packs. I have no means of doing that, so I test with conservative real world use. After 10-20 shallow cycles, those which stay in perfect balance are trusted enough for cell level parallel structure and weak packs removed.

I've had a brand new unused pack flameout while sitting undisturbed for a month, so I treat them like fire bombs until they have proven themselves in use, so there's just no way I'm letting a weak pack hide inside my pack. Each has to prove worthy.

John

Hi John,
Below is a schematic of my 5S 2P LiPo set up. I will be adding 6 more 5S 1P as funds allow. Would you or any fellow E-Sers like to comment?

Hi pendragon8000 as requested the pics keep coming, I have been ordering cables and battery terminals and working on the cable arrangement for my prototype battery box, some pictures below. Notice the terminals are too short in the picture below so I have ordered some 50mm ones.

Here is the latest on my progress so far, the DC/DC converter, charger, controller and batteries are now connected. All electrical systems power up, lights, horn, brakes all working. The problem I have now is that the motor does not spin up when I twist the throttle, some more investigations to do here. If anyone out there has connected a Kelly KBL controller to an ME0913 and got it working I would like to hear from them.

Eureka! The fault was traced to a faulty throttle pot, I bought a cheap 4k7 pot from my local electronic store, connected it and fired it up. The motor span up nicely and was very quiet. I need to source a new pot as I have a PB6 three wire set up. If anyone knows a UK supplier for these 5k Ohm pots please let me know, I found one in the states for $18 (£12) but the shipping costs were $80 (£54).

I have to give thanks to John Fiorenza from Motenergy, Fany from Kelly Controllers and Froodus who all offered advice and help.

16/05/13
Trial controller assembly tray mounting brackets made. Tidied up various connectors and made a bracket to hold down the DC/DC converter tray. Went to start the bike up but the main contactor would not pull in. I had to strip back all my pretty wiring harness to trace the fault. It turned out to be a poor inline crimp which was giving me high resistance. Any way fault fixed, motor span up then stopped and I got an error code 4 blinks then 1 blink. I will go to bed now and deal with it later today as it is now 01:00 in the morning.

17/05/13
My sons 14th birthday, the fault code was an over-voltage at power on, I had set it to 84 V on the controller, my fluke was indicating 83.4V. The battery pack is a 20S2P arrangement which at 4.2V per cell will yield a maximum voltage of 84V. My last balance charge on the 11th of May gave me 83.75V. I updated the max voltage setting to 85V on the controller problem solved.

I took the bike for its first spin up and down my drive way,there is a bit of a lag from opening the throttle before I get forward motion so some tweaking is required there.

Now I need to tidy up the wiring, cut the controller assembly and DC/DC converter trays, and make up some more mounting brackets then it’s MOT time. I will try and get some video footage for you all to see.

Disaster has struck, I had finished cutting the controller and charger assemblies and was connecting everything up ready for the MOT. Whilst connecting the cables to the controller an errant nut
had got lodged between B- and terminal A. I was unaware of this at the time but when I went to power on and twist the throttle there was a bang and a puff of smoke.

I ordered a new controller, ammeter, voltmeter and J1 cable from Kelly Controllers. I tested the charger with the 13Amp 3 pin plug and it all worked. I need a vehicle charge controller to use my J1772 EVSE in my garage.

I began fabricating the plug in housing for the J1772 socket, bought some hinges for the fuel flap and ordered an AVC2 vehicle controller for the charging circuit.

Last edited by Bernel on Jun 02, 2013 5:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.